Another Day, Another Dime

 

A February thaw. It feels like an early spring. I spoke to the birds when I let the cat out. They had nothing to say to me. A couple thrushes did cock their heads to listen to my pathetic whistle. The dawn multitude had much to say to each other though. I'm so glad that I live up here on this ridge top with the forest at my door.

I wrote that last weekend. I apologize for my reticence. Some of you may have seen some drunken scribbles here as I search for an identity other than as a driver that I quickly (oops, one was up for a week) deleted. More on that later, perhaps, but guess what! I'm a driver! Here's my latest misadventure:

The name of this blog is apt. I was sent over the road last week. It was a nightmare. I'm so glad that I only have to fight for a space to park my truck, so that I can sleep, occasionally. And the food...

Joplin Missouri was my terminus. On the way I saw the Arch, my favorite piece of Public Work. An early co-driver of mine once asked, “What's it good for?”

“Would you live in a world without Art?” I asked in reply.

I have spoken before about the many faces of the Arch I have seen: without apparent foundation, or stainless steel edged; but that's all lost in the archive. Unfortunately traffic was tricky both as I crossed the Mississippi, and later when I passed beneath the Arch itself, going back northwest after my first delivery. I didn't have the chance to appreciate it. I stole a few glances, and its reflection in the glass of the downtown skyscrapers surprised me once.

Coming home on I 255, however, I watched the Arch with the City behind it in minute parallax as I traversed the abandoned canal and viable train yards. It's undeniable; it's there; the Gateway.

Is this job really so bad, is it really a nightmare?

I thought my luck was changing when I got a back haul that picked up in Webb City, just north of Joplin, instead of 90 miles further west in Coffeeville Kansas, like the last time I did this run. I pulled into the Flying J on my way to the pick up so that I could clean out the trailer and met gridlock. I never got past the entry and ended up doing a U turn in the drive 20 minutes later.

I was lucky. If I'd gotten into the lot how long would it have taken me to get back out again? And it didn't matter that my trailer was dirty in the end.

Once backed into the dock I had to laugh, I mean really. After getting my empty weight the scale operator told me that the docks were on the opposite corner of the building. He turned to confer with someone then said, “The easy way to do it is to go up 'the trail' along that side of the building, but it's blocked right now. You'll have to go that way and take a left, turn right and straighten out, then back in.” Fair enough.

I headed up “that way” and looked down the first lane to the left. It looked like it might have been possible to get my rig through there except the piles of scrap metal were overflowing into the road so I went further up. I stopped. There was no right to make after the next turn to get straightened out; end of the line. So there I was traipsing through the mud, in the rain, trying to figure out how the hell I was going to get to the docks. A garbage truck driver stopped and gave me some moral support and I laughed it off but thought, “Dude, you drive a straight truck.”

I ended up doing an S back. The sight side part was easy, wide open, but it narrowed to a bottleneck in the blind side. Fortunately the tire tracks in the mud were easy to follow even in my little convex mirrors. I lined up next to another trailer parked there, then got out to give the dock workers my load information. There was nobody around. I looked to check how I was situated to the dock and...what the hell? That one trailer was parked against the only part of the bay that was parallel to the building, the rest of the docks were set at an angle. It was an angle that was impossible to back straight into because of the piles of scrap aluminum. All I can say is that I'm glad I'm a veteran driver or I might have had trouble there.

It was a heavy load and was immediately apparent that I had a tire low on air. “Great, how long is this going to delay me?” I thought, “I just want to go home.” I got out my air hose that hooks to the inboard compressor via the trailer emergency brake line to air up the flat temporarily, so that I could get out of there. My mistake then was in checking the pressure of the other tires. All eight of those trailer tires were low! I admit; like 99% of my compatriots I merely thump the tires and only get out the gauge when I detect trouble. Usually the loads I deal with aren't heavy enough to worry about it but this one was. So I spent an hour there kneeling in the mud, airing up my tires. Sometimes the angels do smile on us though. I don't know why those tires were all so low, but the pressure held and I never had to go into the shop. One more night on the road and I was headed for home!

I was feeling pretty good Friday, on my way back. The load I was hauling didn't deliver until Monday but I was supposed to try and deliver that day. Then my fleet manager sent me a message that said never mind. He must have called ahead to arrange it and been told no go. All I had to do was drop the trailer on the yard on the north side of Indy. I still had to shuttle the Chicago load to the other side of the building in Plainfield but that was supposed to be ready for me by the time I'd get there. The weekend was just ahead. As I rolled into Indiana listening to WISU a fresh snow delineated the branches of the hardwoods. Things were looking OK. I'd forgotten all of my trials and tribulations. Life wasn't so bad.

Then there was an injury accident that had southbound 465 shut down. I jumped off at Crawfordsville Road and took Lyndhurst south. Lyndhurst is a big wide road both up north and further down. I didn't know, however, that it turns into a two lane residential street in between, with lots of school bus stops! I finally made it to Washington street, my destination but then had to ask, “Am I dyslexic, or what?” The accident was at Sam Jones. I was thinking Washington St. was below Sam Jones, but it's not, it's above it. Oops. With everyone else trying to get around the accident too Washington St. was a mess so I jumped on 465 going back north to Rockville road and followed that all the way out to 267, stop light after stop light.

I don't know if I could have done better but it ended up taking me an extra hour in traffic. I was lucky though, because when I got there the Chicago load still wasn't ready yet. That's an hour I would have had to spend reading or something.

I made it home though, I survived. It could have been a lot worse. So is this job a nightmare, is it hell? Naw, it's all in a day's work.

 

Moon Shadow

 

Moon shadows, long and dark across the snow; the branches of the forest all intertwined. Enough light not to stub my toe before ever I flipped a switch. I flipped it off again. The snow crunches underfoot. The Morning Star watches me as I make my way to work. It's cold, but the White River is still liquid; a negative image.

A young friend wants me to post some drawings here. It's not much, but this is something I've been playing with lately:

 

 

 

 

 

Hammer Down

 

Heading east on I 70 the other morning I got behind a slow poke. I waited with my turn signal flashing till there was a break in the traffic, then jumped into the hammer lane, downshifted, floored the accelerator, and went nowhere. I gained speed slowly and passed the obstruction but by that time I had a whole line of impatient, pissed off vehicles behind me. They let me know it too, as they came around me with their engines roaring and cut in way too close for their safety, forcing me to back off on the gas as I was still trying to gain speed. Get used to it people, trucks are going to piss you off more than they ever have before. It wasn't my old truck pushing 400,000 miles breaking down, you see; I was in a brand new 2011 EPA certified “smart truck” with great fuel economy, minimal emissions and no power. In classic double speak the engine is called a “Torque-max,” as in, “there's no torque, it's maxed out.”

Leave it to me to complain about getting a new truck, right? I'm not really, I'm just telling you about it in as colorful a way as I can, and the above incident is how I learned about the capabilities of my new ride. I needed a new truck. I've recently had several nightmare scenarios not due explicitly to the mechanical failure of that old truck, but certainly exacerbated thereby. Whew, I got rid of that old thing in the nick of time! And I'm all for the fuel economy and reduced emissions, believe me. I don't even want to drive a truck in the first place, but I need a job. The new truck is way welcome and besides my comfort level increasing I have much better visibility now, and the turning radius is shorter. I've survived some of our tighter customers in that old behemoth; I be cruising in style now. I thought about hanging some fuzzy dice off of the Prepass (a transponder that sits where a rear view would be if a truck had one).

 

Happy New Year!

 

It worked! The sun went away so you all plugged in a lot of lights to shine in the early darkness and have called the sun back. It really worked, the days are getting longer already. I'll be damned.

I really just wanted to be sure and post something on 1/1/11. My Finnish friends have a web hotel to keep in touch. Each post shows the time here, and the time there. I posted a New Years greeting at 00:00 EST. I know, I had a whole minute to do it, but as I wasn't watching the ball drop, or have anything more obtrusive than the kitchen clock to tell me what time it was I think I did pretty good. I forgot all about it, in fact and had to scramble at the last second, drunk as I was. So anyway...which year was it that I sent that greeting?

Danielle said that she was talking to her mom this afternoon and looked at the clock. It was 1:11.

Spooky.

2011? Cool. I'm going to party like it's 2012.

 

St-St-St---Stress

 

Driving is stressful, there can be no doubt, driving a big truck more so. One of Company's training modules states that a driver's blood pressure goes up just getting behind the wheel of a truck. I don't know the validity of that claim, but I can believe it. What toll is this taking on my long term health? Say Levine, I don't have the luxury of worrying about it.

Driving a big truck in the snow is exponentially more stressful yet. I recently woke up in the morning from an endless round of restless driving dreams and realized that I'd been stressing because snow was predicted for that day. Another time, even more recently, I woke up in the middle of the night thoroughly stressed for the same reason. On top of the fact that it was forecast to snow heavily my first stop of the day was at the customer where I couldn't get traction to get out of their parking lot last year and had to be pulled out. Being early I didn't expect that they'd have plowed yet. Fun and games to look forward to! I couldn't get back to sleep. I tensed my body, shaking, and screamed, venting steam. The cat, who sleeps at the foot of the bed took off lickity-split and didn't came back.

So what happened? The day was a nightmare, but not because I had to be towed out of that lot. I never even made it there. In fact I never made it past the gate at Electrolux. I dropped the trailer. It slid right off the back of my tractor and landed with one foot on the pavement and the other on the grass, smack in the middle of the exit lane. I'm just glad that it fell off there, before I'd gotten onto the street.

The load was light but still the landing gear wouldn't work to raise it. The warehouse manager said that if it weren't snowing he could bring a forklift out to take some of the pressure off the legs so that I could lower them, but as it was there was nothing that he could do. I had no choice but to call it in and get a tow truck to come out and help me, which meant that I'd also have to jump through all the hoops that Company would require of me.

I'd done my safety check. I'd pulled on that sucker hard doing the tug test and I'd looked to make sure that the release arm for the fifth wheel was retracted. I'd even driven from the back of the lot up to the gate with no problem. Still it was my fault, I must admit. I'd done my safety check, but not quite a thorough one. You see, you're supposed to get up underneath the trailer and shine a light into the jaws of the fifth wheel to inspect the actual locking mechanism. It's something that practically nobody does. I'd done it for years and finally decided that if the release lever was retracted then the lock must be in place, no need to contort my body and run the risk of getting grease all over myself. Yet I'd been warned, had I not (see Culpability below)! I should have done the extra step, and believe you me I will from now on!

Company wouldn't let me hook back to the trailer until I'd had the fifth wheel inspected. I took off in the snow heading for the International dealer even before the tow truck arrived. The guy at the service desk there said they'd “work me in” and that I should have a seat in the driver's lounge. Fortunately I had a book with me and no other drivers showed up to turn on the TV for quite awhile. Seven hours later they called my name.

I was hoping that they'd find something wrong with the fifth wheel. I mean, there must be something wrong with it, right? If there was an obvious problem then I'd be off the hook. They didn't find anything wrong with it.

The bill there at the shop was $150.00. The tow truck was probably at least as much again. Fortunately there was nothing wrong with the trailer itself so there was no expense there. I felt responsible, I felt like I should pay. I was trying to decide how much I wanted them to take out of my check each week when my supervisor called to tell me that I'd been charged with a preventable collision and that I was on probation for six months. Preventable, yes, but a collision? No one was hurt, no equipment was damaged. This wouldn't go on my license, but it would go on my DAC report and might jeopardize my ability to get another driving job. In light of my long service and near spotless safety record I thought that a little harsh. “So to hell with them,” I decided, “let them pay for it. They can write it off on their taxes anyway as an operating expense.”

I also had to do several on-line training modules and be “instructed” by my supervisor, a guy who's never driven a truck before in his life, on how to properly connect to a trailer. It was humiliating, but Jeff's a nice guy and didn't try to lecture me, but only had me go through the steps while he watched. It was just something that Company required him to do as well.

So what did happen, why did my trailer fall off the tractor? I don't know, it remains a mystery. The official reason was that I was “high hooked,” something that cannot be the explanation. In that earlier post, Culpability, I describe how the trailers there at Electrolux are often high and I always lower them before hooking. Could the locking mechanism have already been closed before I backed under the trailer? Possibly. A part of relying solely on the release arm being retracted as an indication that the locking mechanism is engaged is that I always check, while lowering the trailer, that the release arm is extended to begin with. I might have inadvertently missed that step, what with the snow and all. But then why didn't that become apparent when I did the tug test, and how did I drag the trailer all the way from the back of the lot up to the exit gate?

We'll never know, but a 30 year veteran driver I met in the driver's lounge there at International offered a possible explanation. He said that if too much grease builds up in the fifth wheel then it can become viscid in the cold and prevent the fifth wheel jaws from closing completely. You can do the tug test and you can pull the trailer and everything seems fine but in actuality the jaws are creeping back open under the continued pressure. It sounds like a reasonable explanation to me, though it fails to explain why I almost lost a trailer that earlier time which was during the prolonged Indian Summer, before the cold hit.

I'm gun shy now. I check the fifth wheel incessantly and still I'm afraid to pull out. I wonder, would I have noticed anything wrong had I done the visual test that morning? I don't know, I certainly wouldn't have been as diligent as I now am trying to detect any slight opening in the fifth wheel jaws. And I have to wonder if there isn't some fault in my fifth wheel that International didn't detect. Is this going to happen again, regardless of my renewed diligence? Will we finally find out what actually happened when it fails again, with possibly fatal consequences? I'd rather it remain a mystery.

Another thing that I have to wonder is why oh why am I so fucking devoted to my job? The roads were terrible that day. Every other driver on my account called off that morning due to the weather, which was fine by Company. But not me, no. Like the damn Post Master General I felt I had to do my appointed rounds, regardless of the toll it might take on me or others. Maybe it's time for a career change. Does anyone know of a less stressful job I can do that will let me pay my bills? No? Perhaps I'll become an Artist.

 

A River Runs Through It

 

Mississinewa, Salamonie, Eel, Tippecanoe, Vermillion, Sugar, Big Raccoon; further downstream the Embarras, White, Patoka, and Little Wabash: these are the major tributaries to the Wabash River, before she flows into the Ohio. Her channel defines Indiana's southwestern border and her watershed covers most of the state. No wonder On the Banks of the Wabash is the Indiana state song:

Round my Indiana homestead wave the cornfields,
In the distance loom the woodlands clear and cool.
Oftentimes my thoughts revert to scenes of childhood,
Where I first received my lessons, nature's school...

Oh, the moonlight's fair tonight along the Wabash,
From the fields there comes the breath of newmown hay.
Through the sycamores the candle lights are gleaming,
On the banks of the Wabash, far away.

I hadn't realized that all these rivers are one, I just enjoyed crossing them, upstream or down. In the far southwest the valley is so wide you don't even know that you're in one, but upriver the gentle hills along the watercourse are extraordinarily picturesque, like being inside a Currier and Ives print from yesterday. I became interested because when going through Logansport on IN 25 you cross the Wabash twice, or so I thought. I looked at the map and realized that you only cross the Wabash once and then cross the Eel just upstream of their confluence. Looking further I saw how all these little rivers flow together. I wanted to tell you how pretty they are so I did a little research which proved quite interesting.

Rivers; who can tell which is which? According to Wikipedia the early French maps had the Ohio as a tributary to the Wabash. It was a trade route thing. I thought the same thing when I looked at a map of Pittsburgh. “The Allegheny should be the Ohio.” It extends way further at divided highway status on the map while what is labeled the Ohio takes a tight turn and dies. But who am I?

When driving I like the signs that tell me what body of water I'm passing over. Crossing the NY Southern Tier on Interstate 86 one traverses the Seneca Nation. Bridges over the Allegheny there have signs that read Ohi? Yo. So I was right after all. (the question mark stands in for a glottal stop, which I couldn't find a code for)

The Wabash is a blessing to Indiana, hard won, apparently. Illinois and Ohio, her immediate neighbors, have beautiful rivers of their own, but not with such an articulated system. They are mostly flat, broken only periodically, while Indiana is graced with extensive gentle hills, covered in hardwood, even in the glacial north of the state. Again according to Wikipedia the Wabash Valley was created when a massive proto Lake Erie (Lake Maumee), filled with glacial melt broke through a pile of rocks that Papa Glacier had shoved there. Cataclysm (the Maumee Torrent)! And hence our serene valley.

And it is pretty. The Wabash Valley is a blessing to me, that's for sure. I can even take a moments rest from the stress of driving in the snow to appreciate how lovely the hills are covered in white. Yes, Indian Summer was long but winter has hit with a vengeance, and shows no sign of letting up anytime soon. I'm sure I'll tell you more about that later.

 

Dual Exhaust

 

And here I thought maybe they were going to cancel winter entirely this year, it's been so warm; as if global warming were a good thing. But no, the first real snow of the season is falling right now (wee hours of Saturday morning). I haven't actually had to scrape frost off the windshield yet but it was cool enough to see your breath late into the morning, this morning (Friday, no snow). I didn't notice, in my heated cab, but I was up in Northern Indiana, near Shipshewana, in Amish country. It was the carriage horses' breath that I found interesting; like twin streams of dragon breath released to the rhythm of a coal fired locomotive gaining steam. Those proud creatures make it look so easy but come to think of it, if I were pulling a ton of conveyance at a trot I'd be breathing heavily too.